Work at Home Fence

The Work at Home Fence - I've been on both sides of it: Telecommuting and Home Business Mentoring -- My work from home experience: I've ... built websites for myself and other people, sold on ebay, advertised on my site, done affiliate marketing, written ebooks, created clipart, created; marketed; and sold my own actual products, hired freelance coders, hired independent contractors for writing. Things I will never do: direct selling, parties.

Friday, December 02, 2005

How To Explore if a Home Business is Legitimate or not

I stumbled across this article that at first glance appears to be an informational article about how to create a happier life by working at home, but upon further exploration, seems to be nothing but a pitch for Family Franchise.

So, with the initial pitch, then all the hyperbole at the Family Franchise site, this really seems like a good business, huh? Well, I don't think so. It might be a good kind of job for some people, but not for me. How about you? Let's explore ways to determine if it is legitimate and worth your time:

The $49 startup cost doesn't scare me. If you wanted to start doing affiliate marketing, which is what I do, you probably would have at least an $89 startup cost, which would cover only 1 year of internet hosting costs and domain name registration .. so you'd have to pay that $89 again next year. $49 to start a business is not outrageous, as long as it is startup costs for a business and you are not paying to get a job. If you are concerned about any fees you are considering paying for another business, leave me a comment here and I'll tell you what I think of them.

So, the upfront cost isn't unreasonable, and I actually am not mad about this website, which I do get about a lot of similar sites. Many websites like this won't even tell you what the product is unless you give them your phone number so someone can call you and give you the hard sell. Grrr I hate that. I hate being sold like that and I will click off of those types of sites in a second - you need to understand that any business that hard sells to you is going to need you to hard sell to your customers. If you don't like or want to do that, then stay away.

So, this site tells you right away what the products are - nutritional supplements. Well, nothing fantastic, but certainly a viable product. Personally, I am not a vitamin taker, so I would not be a good vitamin seller, but perhaps you are? If you took these vitamins and believed them to be powerful facilitators of good health for you, you would probably be a great vitamin seller. You would be able to speak easily and covincingly about your product.

So, in order to start exploring if we think this website is a scam or not we first start by searching the business name:

Family Franchise. hmmm, nothing good, nothing bad, nothing at all. This means it could be a new business. Let's see. (if we had found people complaining about the business then we could have just written it off right away.)

check the website at whois.net to see the particulars of the domain Some are protected - for legitimate reasons or for spammy reasons, you'd have no way of knowing, but this one isn't. It shows the website first registered in Dec of 2003. Well, that's fairly recent, but not recent enough to worry me. If the domain had been registered within the last year that would be a huge red flag to me that something could be wrong.

Check the registration information against the website contact info. At this website, the contact person, the business name, an address, a telephone number and an email are prominently displayed and completely match what is given on the whois page. This is great. This much transparency in who is responsible for the information usually means that this person is not planning on cutting and running with your money. Of course this can be faked, but when the website info matches with the whois info, that's a big flag on the good side, a blue flag, if you will.

Next Step is to do a search on the company name - and this search is perhaps the most telling for this site. From this search you can see that this person (this company) has several websites selling these same nutritional supplements he's going to ask you to sell. There is nothing wrong with this - in fact, since none of them are spammy this actually speaks strongly for him. This man is guaranteeing or attempting to guarantee a steady income by diversifying which websites it comes from. That way, if one site goes down or is effected in the search engines, the other ones are still around making him money - this is a smart way to do business on the internet and it tells me that he is going to be around for a while.

Also found by searching the company name is the distributor this man uses. It matches the distributor he says he uses.

So, it looks to me like this guy is making money selling vitamins, and now he's trying to make more money by teaching you to sell vitamins with a home business the same way he does. If you buy your vitamins to sell from him or he gets a commission for whatever you sell, well then it's worth it for him to spend the time teaching you. If you do as well as he is doing, then he'll make continuing money down the road from a few months of work he does now.

We certainly could go farther in examining this business and this website, but after everything I've seen so far I don't think we have to -- after my initial misgivings, I have to say this is probably a legitimate business, and a viable one. Just remember you may be asked to approach your friends and family and maybe you'll be encouraged to set up a table at the local farmer's market or whatever, but if you're OK with this, then this might be a good business for you. You'll have to make that decision.